So if the world is indeed not to be held hostage by non-state actors operating from Pakistan, what can be done?
[…]
Rather than simply begging the Indians to show restraint, a better option could be to internationalize the response. Have the international community declare that parts of Pakistan have become ungovernable and a menace to international security. Establish an international force to work with the Pakistanis to root out terrorist camps in Kashmir as well as in the tribal areas. This would have the advantage of preventing a direct military confrontation between India and Pakistan. It might also save face for the Pakistani government, since the international community would be helping the central government reestablish its authority in areas where it has lost it. But whether or not Islamabad is happy, don’t the international community and the United States, at the end of the day, have some obligation to demonstrate to the Indian people that we take attacks on them as seriously as we take attacks on ourselves?
Would such an action violate Pakistan’s sovereignty? Yes, but nations should not be able to claim sovereign rights when they cannot control territory from which terrorist attacks are launched.
On the one hand my immediate reaction to Mr. Kagan’s column was to wonder what color the sky was in the world of which he writes. “The international community” speaks through international institutions. NATO is, essentially, a North American-European alliance, as one might guess from the name of the organization. It doesn’t speak for the world.
The only international institution that comes to mind as having the sort of internationalness that would be required for such an action is the United Nations and there is no chance whatever that the United Nations would muster a force to step over the Pakistani government to subdue areas of Pakistan that the government of Pakistan hasn’t had the ability or willingness to bring under its own control. Russia and China, each a permanent member of the Security Council with the veto that brings, simply won’t allow it to happen.
Such an action could, presumably, be one for the “league of democracies” that Sen. McCain spoke of in the presidential campaign. IMO venue shopping of that sort reduces legitimacy ipso facto and, consequently, such an institution by its mere existence would undermine the very legitimacy that it seeks.
How would such an institution function? If it requires unanimity, we probably will be left in the fix we’re in now. If it operates by simple majority or, possibly, even by supermajority, we may well be drawn into battles we don’t want to fight.
For good or ill we are stuck with the international community we have and the UN speaks for it.
On the other hand I’m very glad that Mr. Kagan has brought up the key security challenge that faces us.
Our grand strategy has succeeded. The strength and capabilities of our military and our nuclear arsenal have successfully deterred near-peer military confrontation and will do so for the foreseeable future. Surrogates aren’t nearly as effective as they used to be during the Cold War, possibly because that Russia’s objectives are self-serving is more obvious than that the Soviet Union’s were. It’s easier for a prospective client to see the bear’s teeth when they aren’t obscured by the hammer and sickle.
The greatest remaining threat is from non-state actors, particularly those with the tacit support of states, who mostly find a home in ungoverned territories.
Look around at the areas of greatest trouble today: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Congo, Sudan. They’re all really ungoverned areas with a thin veneer of central government.
That’s why, rather than undermining the Westphalian system by strengthening generally unaccountable international institutions or non-government actors, I favor supporting it. Pakistan needs to be held accountable for what goes on within its borders. That’s the international consensus we should be seeking.
The Media Research Center today officially announced the Free Speech Alliance, a gathering of a multitude of organizations and hundreds of thousands of individual citizens dedicated to ensuring that the Censorship Doctrine, mis-named the “Fairness” Doctrine, is never again reinstated.
This move appears to have genuinely puzzled virtually every left-wing blog I read, due largely to the fact that there doesn’t appear to be anybody in the Democratic Party who is at all interested in reviving this doctrine at all.
To figure out who was causing such agitation, I went searching for the proponents of the fairness doctrine. I looked at Obama’s position–and it turns out that he doesn’t want the policy reinstated. Then I called the array of Democratic congressmen who had been tagged by conservatives as doctrine proponents. But they all denied any intention to push for its reinstatement.
Personally, given the staggering losses that the Republican Party saw in 2006 and 2008, I think the reason for creating this organization is obvious. It’s been created for the same reason why Division I basketball teams play Division II teams early in the season: it’s an easy win. And that easy win lets the D-I teams puff up their Win-Loss records so they look better when they seek alumni fundraising. (”Support us! We’re already 5-0!”)
Given the current political climate, conservative wins in the next two years are going to be few and far between. So conservative lobbying organizations are going to need a lot of funds to get anything accomplished. But it’s hard to raise money when it looks like you’re losing all the time. The solution? Raise money by fighting a policy that nobody supports! The continued lack of a Fairness Doctrine is the MRC’s ticket to “proving” that their being effective with their donations. All they have to do is harp in their fundraising letters that they’re being “successful” in fighting the Fairness Doctrine, and voila! Instant comparative advantage!
Unless something drastic happens, Al Franken will lose his bid to overtake Norm Coleman’s narrow first-count win of Minnesota’s U.S. Senate election through the recount. He’s considering other options, including asking the Democratically-dominated Senate to step in.
To win his case before the state Canvassing Board, Franken must prevail on more than 6 percent of his challenges of Coleman votes even if Coleman fails to succeed on any of his challenges, a Star Tribune analysis shows.
If the outcome of past election disputes provides a clue, Franken will have a hard time reversing enough votes to win, said one veteran elections official who has been involved in the Senate recount. “Based upon the kinds of challenges I’ve been looking at in the last two weeks, I think that’s just not going to happen,” said Joe Mansky, Ramsey County elections manager.
Democrat Al Franken’s campaign said Monday that as many as 1,000 absentee ballots were improperly disqualified in Minnesota’s Senate race, and that it may appeal to courts or the U.S. Senate to order that those ballots be counted. “Wherever the numbers stand today…that number simply cannot be relevant if it does not include all the votes that were legally cast,” said Franken attorney Marc Elias. “No recount can be considered accurate or complete until all the ballots cast by lawful voters are counted.”
Minnesota’s Board of Canvassers ruled last Wednesday that it would not revisit the improperly disqualified ballots.
Elias said that of the 12,000 disqualified absentee ballots in the race, “as many as 1,000″ ballots were improperly excluded, and should be counted. Elias said it would appeal to the Board of Canvassers, courts, or even the U.S. Senate to ensure those ballots be counted.
The U.S. Constitution allows each congressional chamber to be the “Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members.” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) called the Board of Canvassers’ decision to not count the absentee ballots “a cause for great concern,” fueling speculation that the Senate would explore the legality of the Minnesota recount’s results.
With the slim possibility of a “filibuster-proof” 60 Democratic Senators hanging in the balance (Franken would need to win and Saxby Chambliss would have to lose his runoff) Reid and his cohorts have a lot of motivation to see it Franken’s way. Coleman’s team is not pleased:
“The Franken campaign has made it clear that the recounted votes and will of Minnesotans matter little to them, and that they intend to take their campaign to change the outcome of this election on to the United States Senate,” said Coleman campaign spokesman Mark Drake. “Al Franken should personally reject this strategy outright, and honor the right of Minnesotans to choose who their senator should be — and not allow lawsuits and the strong-arm tactics of the majority leader of the United States Senate to intervene in this process.”
We desperately need to clean up our electoral system to end this sort of nonsense. Voting rules and procedures need to be streamlined and idiot-proofed, removing the need for post-balloting interpretation by interested parties. I have no opinion whatever on the merit of Franken’s claim on the absentee ballots. I’m quite sure, though, that if he wins based on the intervention of partisan officials, it’ll be widely viewed as illegitimate.
David Gregory will become the permanent host of “Meet the Press,” HuffPo reports; NBC has issued a non-denial denial.
David Gregory will take the reins as moderator of NBC’s “Meet the Press,” the Huffington Post has learned. Gregory has been a leading contender for the permanent spot since Tom Brokaw stepped in as interim moderator following Tim Russert’s death in June.
In recent weeks, a short list including Gregory, Andrea Michell, Gwen Ifill, and Chuck Todd had been considered the top candidates for the position, while Katie Couric and Ted Koppel were viewed as dark horses.
Brokaw will conclude his duties as interim moderator this weekend, when he will interview President-Elect Barack Obama.
Gregory’s a perfectly fine choice — presuming he actually is the choice — but not an exciting one. Koppel would have brought gravitas and Todd would have been more interesting. None of them would likely have gotten me to watch the show again. As it is, I’m down to TiVo’ing “This Week” and, usually, fast-forwarding to the roundtable.
Former President Bill Clinton has been mentioned as a possible replacement for his wife in the Senate.
Former president Bill Clinton is being “mentioned” as a logical replacement for Hillary Clinton, who’ll vacate her New York Senate seat upon her presumptive approval as Secretary of State.
The task of choosing a successor falls to David Paterson, New York’s Democratic governor. Whomever he picks would serve for two years, before a special election in November 2010 to decide who fills the last two years of Clinton’s term.
Paterson has a strong bench to choose from. There are a number of contenders, including at least eight members of New York’s delegation in the House of Representatives, New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown, Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion, Nassau County Executive Thomas Suozzi, Caroline Kennedy, and her cousin, Robert Kennedy Jr.
So … why would he go with a former six-term governor of Arkansas and two-term U.S. president whose only connection to the state is that his wife represented it in the Senate? And who’s “mentioning” it, anyway?
In an op-ed column last week in The Washington Post, journalists Karl Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac urged Paterson to “send Bill Clinton to the Senate.” [...] Bill Clinton would bring gravitas to the job, and he obviously knows his way around Washington.
Uh huh.
But some Democratic strategists who used to work for Bill Clinton don’t think the former president would want to go from leader of the free world to being the junior senator from New York. Clinton’s office deferred to Paterson’s office when asked for a comment.
Here’s guessing that someone other than Bill Clinton gets the nod.
A Media Bistro announcement in my inbox informs me that,
Gawker.com video editor Richard Blakeley postponed the [monthly Media Meshing] party to next week to accommodate holiday hangovers, but he exclusively told The Press List that December’s Meshing will be the last. Blakeley says he’s doing away with the popular event because the economic crisis has left many media people unemployed and, “it seems kind of rude to be getting trashed when people are without jobs.”
I was never going to attend one of these parties, so I’ve got no self-interest at stake here but Blakeley’s reasoning strikes me as silly. Almost as silly as some of the comments on Megan McArdle’s Happy Thanksgiving post chiding her for being so public about the joys in her life when some are less than joyful.
Approximately 94 percent of Americans who wish to be employed are employed. Even in the best of times, some Americans are miserable. And, even if Barack Obama permanently ends that unhappy condition by deft use of his magic pony, one presumes someone, somewhere will be in something less than a state of absolute bliss.
At what point is it permissible to act as if you’re happy?
Further, if one can afford to throw large parties at public venues and would otherwise do so but for the unseemliness of it all, it’s worth noting that canceling said party will contribute to the very economic downturn causing said fear.
So, if it’s “rude” to “be getting trashed when people are without jobs,” what label do we apply to putting more people out of work by failing to get trashed?
Photo by Flickr user yewenyi under Creative Commons license.
The U.S. military expects to have 20,000 uniformed troops inside the United States by 2011 trained to help state and local officials respond to a nuclear terrorist attack or other domestic catastrophe, according to Pentagon officials.
The long-planned shift in the Defense Department’s role in homeland security was recently backed with funding and troop commitments after years of prodding by Congress and outside experts, defense analysts said.
There are critics of the change, in the military and among civil liberties groups and libertarians who express concern that the new homeland emphasis threatens to strain the military and possibly undermine the Posse Comitatus Act, a 130-year-old federal law restricting the military’s role in domestic law enforcement.
But the Bush administration and some in Congress have pushed for a heightened homeland military role since the middle of this decade, saying the greatest domestic threat is terrorists exploiting the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
Before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, dedicating 20,000 troops to domestic response — a nearly sevenfold increase in five years — “would have been extraordinary to the point of unbelievable,” Paul McHale, assistant defense secretary for homeland defense, said in remarks last month at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. But the realization that civilian authorities may be overwhelmed in a catastrophe prompted “a fundamental change in military culture,” he said.
In Crisis and Leviathan, Robert Higgs shows that the main reason lies in government’s responses to national “crises” (real or imagined), including economic upheavals (e.g., the Great Depression) and especially war (e.g., World Wars I and II, Cold War, etc.). The result is ever increasing government power which endures long after each crisis has passed, impinging on both civil and economic liberties and fostering extensive corporate welfare and pork. As government power grows, writes Higgs, it achieves a form of autonomy, making it ever more difficult to decrease its size and scope, and to resist its further efforts to increase its reach, so long as the citizenry remain uninformed of its true effects.
In resposne to the war on terror we have a new federal department that has a cabinent level appointee, considerably more spending, and now watring down if not the outright removal of a 130 year old law limiting the use of U.S. military on U.S. soil. How long before mission creep has the military aiding in drug enforcement, crowd control and other such endeavors without the need for declaring a state of emergency?
Jim Geraghty notes, as many of us did, that the lectern and microphone placement at today’s press conference made Barack Obama’s national security team look quite short. The notable exception was National Security Advisor designee Jim Jones, who at 6′5” towered over the proceedings.
My guess is that the rest of them won’t be asked to join in any of Obama’s pickup basketball games. Jones played varsity at Georgetown, so he’s in either way.
